Recently, an ultrasound system has been extensively used in the medical field due to its non-invasive and non-destructive nature. Modern high-performance ultrasound imaging systems and techniques are commonly used to produce two dimensional ultrasound images, three-dimensional ultrasound images and color flow images of internal features of patients. Further, such ultrasound systems provide various functions such as image recording, image annotation, zooming, archiving, panning and the like.
As the number of functions performed by the ultrasound system is increased, the size of a user interface such as a control panel, on which a keyboard, a track ball and slide bars are installed, is also inevitably increased. However, it is difficult to expand the area of the user interface due to the limited space of the ultrasound system. To resolve this problem, the ultrasound system may provide a touch screen as the user interface. The touch screen may be mounted on a control panel in the conventional ultrasound system. In order to install the touch screen on the ultrasound system, a touch panel liquid crystal display and an additional graphic card should be additionally provided. Thus, installing the touch screen on the control panel significantly increases the manufacturing costs.
Further, the ultrasound system may use a display, the horizontal size of which is relatively lager than the vertical size (e.g., the aspect ratio is 4:3 or 16:9). However, there is a problem since a display area of the display is not efficiently used due to the characteristics of the ultrasound image.